page_title: Arnhem Land
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Arnhem Land / Geography
caption_attribution_description: English: A sign located in central Arnhem Land, in Australia's Northern Territory. To enter Arnhem Land requires permission from the Northern Land Council (a statutory authority representing the indigenous inhabitants of the northern half of the Territory). Parts of the region, as in the area behind this sign, are 'sacred' - ie they have significant cultural/historuical/religious significance to the indigenous owners, and are essentially "off limits" even to those with permission to travel across Arnhem Land.
context_page_description: Arnhem Land is a historical region of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around 500 km from the territory capital, Darwin. In 1623, Dutch East India Company captain Willem Joosten van Colster sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape Arnhem is named after his ship, the Arnhem, which itself was named after the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands.
  The area covers about 97,000 square kilometres and has an estimated population of 16,000, of whom 12,000 are Indigenous Australians. The region's service hub is Nhulunbuy, 600 square kilometres east of Darwin, set up in the early 1970s as a mining town. Other major population centres are Yirrkala, Gunbalanya, Ramingining, and Maningrida.
  A substantial proportion of the population, which is mostly Aboriginal, lives on small outstations or homelands. This outstation movement started in the early 1980s. Many Aboriginal groups moved to usually very small settlements on their traditional lands, often to escape the problems of the larger towns.
context_section_description: The area is from Port Roper on the Gulf of Carpentaria around the coast to the East Alligator River, where it adjoins Kakadu National Park. The major centres are Jabiru on the Kakadu National Park border, Maningrida at the Liverpool River mouth, and Nhulunbuy (also known as Gove) in the far north-east, on the Gove Peninsula. Gove is the site of large-scale bauxite mining with an associated alumina refinery. Its administrative centre is the town of Nhulunbuy, the fourth-largest population centre in the Northern Territory.
  The climate of Arnhem Land is tropical monsoon with a wet and dry season.  The temperature has little seasonal variation; however, it can range from overnight lows of 15 °C (59 °F) in the dry season (April to September) to daily highs of 33 °C (91 °F) in the wet season (October to March).
caption: Some areas of deep cultural significance to the indigenous inhabitants are off-limits even to those with permission to travel across Arnhem Land.
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